- [Instructor] Funding for the Secret Life of Scientists, is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

(upbeat music) - My first experience with the path of being a scientist was this minorities introduction to technology and engineering program at Purdue University.

And I was an eighth grade student, I had no idea what a chemist was or what a physicist even what an engineer was.

I remember thinking I wanted to be a bus driver because I saw the bus guy and I was like, well, I could do that job.

And so this program kind of introduced me to what a different life would be.

And we got to go to the summer camp program.

There's this Bridge Building Contest and it was also wood, of course.

I really wanted to win that, and I realized, that some of the other kids were happy to be there, but they also wanted to go out and play, and all had to do, in order to beat them was just to work a little bit harder.

And so I stayed in and build my bridge a little bit more, it paid off in the end.

I was the number one Bridge Building Contest winner that year, they gave me a little calculator as a prize and then all the other kids started calling me professor.

(upbeat music) I don't think I've been given any special gift for any type of math, any type of science.

In order to get through school, I worked a lot harder than everybody else.

If you want it bad enough, and if you try hard enough, and you go in after class, and if you ask the teacher, and if you read the book, and if you read another book, and if you go to the librarian and ask for another book, then you can eventually understand whatever it is, you're trying to understand.

And that's the only way I became a professor.

(upbeat music) Because I've been given so many opportunities by formative action programs, by minority fellowships, a lot of what I do, is a lot of of outreach and a lot of give back to the community.

(upbeat music) We had this National Society of Black Engineers on Saturdays, we would have a tutoring session on every Saturday, I took over the program 'cause it was kind of flailing for a little while, and we really built it back up.

We went up to Harlem, we set up a tables and got the word out the communities I send posters out, and we really built our base to the point where I could start inviting in people to speak.

(upbeat music) And then our final lecture for that year, was Horst Stormer, who had just won the Nobel Prize at Columbia.

They didn't really know what the Nobel Prize was, And then somebody asked him how it felt to win the Nobel Prize, and he goes into his pocket and he pulls out the Nobel Prize.

All these kids got to actually see a Nobel Prize, gotta see a Nobel Prize winner, gotta take their picture with a Nobel Prize, and got to understand that isn't something that just a few elite people but it's the guy down the street.

And takes a Saturday, takes four hours on a Saturday to talk to you.

I think anyone who wants to be a scientist can be a scientist.

(upbeat music) I've always been fascinated with the camera and without stops time essentially.

But I started getting more and more into it, in my graduate school years at Columbia.

I entered a contest, I took a series of pictures of my father and I.

And I set up in a box and it was a self timer and it was him and I together, and for some reason the first picture, I'm kind of out of the frame, but he's giving his all to the camera, and that's the one I entered the contest in and I won.

After entering just one photo.

(upbeat music) There's this moment in photography, it is kind of like how the ancients talked about capturing someone's soul and film you.

You can look at a picture and if they're giving you themselves, you can see that.

(upbeat music) It's that magical moment, for me I think of it as the truth, that person when they finally show themselves, when they finally show up in that print, that tells so much about that person.

And it's really, really rare, I take three or four roles, and it could be one picture, where the person shows up and all the other times they don't show up.

(upbeat music) I think the connection between science and photography at that level, is perseverance.

If I stop for a second and I think, oh, no, I need to come up from a higher angle, or I need to get this person's attention or then you can get a better picture.

And that's the same thing with science.

You have to stop and kind of put your intuition into it, and then look at it from a slightly different angle.

I think that's what I've been doing with the science, and I think that's kind of helped my photography and vice versa.

(upbeat music) So I'm an Nanoparticle Scientist.

When you get something really, really small, the nano size a billionth of a meter, everything starts to change.

They offer new properties and you end up making different structures that you had never thought of before.

And we're trying to make energy applications out of it.

There's so much heat, which ends up being energy, is just thrown away.

So we're trying to harvest some of the heat, that's all around us, and turn it into energy.

Nanoparticles help you because they offer new properties more efficient properties.

Wow, that's short, huh?

(upbeat music) Come on, film.

(upbeat music) I took one of my friend, Josh and is mother's friend at this resort in Jamaica, and it was really nice.

(upbeat music) I think the biggest misperception about scientists is that they're an elite squad.

That you can't be a scientist, I think anyone can be a scientist.

(upbeat music) Portraits.

(upbeat music) Definitely candid.

(upbeat music) Einstein was incredible.

Einstein is the person who can stick with a problem longest.

He saw something and he stopped everything else, and he could just focus in on that one thing.

So I want to be like that.

(upbeat music) I like the lab better than the lecture because you're discovering something new all the time.

I've photoshopped some things before to clean them up.

(upbeat music) Keith Jarret, Art Blakey, Thelonious Monk the standard.

(upbeat music) Nobel Prize, tenure is just a job.

It's all about the science for me.

(upbeat music)